Abstracts

Sustainable Forest Management: Exploring Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in South Asia

Arresting Timber Logging in Pakistan: A Market based Approach

Safiya Aftab* and Moeed Yusuf**

The rate of Pakistan’s woody biomass loss is second highest in the world (GoP 1998)¹. In large part this is the result of excessive timber felling. While the entire focus of the initiatives to arrest forest degradation has remained on improving institutional bottlenecks, weak governance and low incentives for public officials have led to a persistent failure of this strategy.

This paper provides a rather innovative means of sidetracking institutional perversions by addressing timber prices. Currently, high timber prices act as a perverse incentive for deforestation. We examine the possibility of making the price of imported timber competitive across the board in order to naturally undercut the incentives for the use of domestic timber. Our key research questions include: How will the demand for local timber be impacted at various import duty levels (including tariff and taxation)? Will there need to be duty adjustments to account for market penetration?

The study is based on primary data on costs and prices collected from five major timber markets in Pakistan (the data was collected under an SDPI project undertaken for the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics (SANDEE). We focus on characterizing the supply and demand equilibrium of timber by attempting to identify factors that lead to the dominance of domestic or imported lumber varieties across a range of markets. Through an econometric analysis, we will also be able to distinguish between varieties of wood and across markets, and variables representing costs of local timber processing will be added. Further, we construct a value chain from available data on transport and production costs. The analysis will be used to assess how barriers other than the import tariffs may influence the sale of domestic and imported lumber.

This study does not aim to present a prescription that will substitute the need to revamp institutional anomalies in forest management. Rather, a market based initiative that will naturally allow the private sector to take charge in meeting local timber demand – this would dilute the incentive for local felling – will automatically reduce the hold of the vested interests that want the status quo of the forest management regime to be retained. In essence, the market based approach facilitates the need for institutional restructuring. This is an example of synergetic policy making where public sector policies benefits private sector interests, which in turn allow the former to execute its goals more efficiently. In essence, our analysis would provide for a positive incentive regime that allows for a market based collaboration between the public and private sectors, at the same time, impacting sustainable development goals positively.

1. Government of Pakistan (1998), Biodiversity Action Plan 1998, Islamabad: Ministry of Environment, Local Government and Rural Development.

* Safiya Aftab is a Research Fellow with the Strategic and Economic Policy Research Pvt. Ltd. Islamabad, Pakistan. Ms. Aftab’s research interests include the analysis of growth and poverty, fiscal and financial reform and public service delivery, and competitiveness issues. She has a strong personal interest in human rights, transparency in public institutions and judicial reform, and is interested in exploring the linkages between these and macroeconomic issues.

** Moeed Yusuf is a Graduate Fellow at the Fredrick L. Pardee Center for the study of the Longer Range Future at Boston University and is a Visiting Research Associate at SDPI.

Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Forestry: Implementing Strategy

Faisal Haq Shaheen *and Shaheen Rafi Khan**

Pakistan’s fragile forests have a history of mixed use patterns that have supported a variety of sustainable livelihoods. In recent times, Pakistan’s forestry sector has suffered steady declines in density and coverage due to a number of political, management, social and environmental constraints. Governance challenges have ignored the possibilities of public private partnerships where profitable operation, resource management and long term sustainability is contracted out to a private firm. While Pakistan has considered various permutations of PPPs in the past – only one has been applied in the strict sense of the term. A variety of approaches exist across a number of forest resource rich countries, but the most promising appears to be that of partnering with indigenous forestry communities in order to maintain a balance between all components of sustainable development (Adhikari, 2005). While Pakistan has introduced legislation, some regulations and sub clauses that recognize community forestry, the institutional and policy framework requires updating and re-alignment to embed community forestry management practices within forestry governance frameworks (Castro and Ettenger, 1997). In terms of policy, Pakistan’s conservation strategy already makes room for such initiatives to be articulated (Hamid, 2002).

This study is based on secondary data and literature that outlines existing forestry management strategies and their results across similar biomes within the global South. Clear resource rights and sustainable development objectives and relationships between communities and sectoral dynamics are explored within the literature (Ali et. al, 2007) with the intent of formulating an effective PPP strategy. A proposed formulation for forestry PPPs in Pakistan is introduced, with an outlining of the benefits and risks. The paper emphasizes that of utmost importance is the creation of an enabling environment where pilot project territories, accountability frameworks for authorities and community based monitoring can all be factored into long term decision making that supports the principles of sustainable forestry management and resource development. Resource management strategic plans are surveyed with a focus on those management tools that have been proven to work in recent times. A strategic plan that assembles all of the factors and variables is included – outlining proposed timelines and milestones.

References

Adhikari, B. (2005), ‘Poverty, Property Rights and Collective Action: Understanding the Distributive Aspects of Common Property Resource Management,’ Environment and Development Economics, 10, pp. 7–31, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ali, T., Ahmada, M., Shahbaz, B. and Suleri, A. (2007), ‘Impact of Participatory Forest Management on Financial Assets of Rural Communities in Northwest Pakistan,’ Ecological Economics, 63, pp. 588-593. 
Castro, A.P., Ettenger, K. (1997), ‘Indigenous Knowledge and Conflict Management: Exploring Local Perspectives and Mechanisms for Dealing with Community Forestry Disputes’, in Compilation of Discussion Papers Made to the Electronic Conference on Addressing Conflicts through Community Forestry, vol. 1, pp. 141-164, Rome: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

* Faisal Haq Shaheen is a Management Analyst with the City of Toronto where he coordinates and advises on municipal process and service performance improvements. He is a graduate student at the Faculty of Public Policy and Administration, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada and also serves as a Visiting Research Associate at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Islamabad, Pakistan.

** Dr. Shaheen Rafi Khan is a Visiting Research Fellow, SDPI

The Quest for Sustainable Forest Management: Exploring Public-Private Partnerships in the Forestry Sector in Pakistan

Shaheen Rafi Khan*

The pre and post-colonial periods witnessed changes in the state of forest related institutions and management, which have been linked with deforestation and loss of community livelihoods. Among other things, the record illustrates that poor communities—small forest owners, rights holders, non-owners, women and grazers—who depend traditionally on forests for their livelihoods were steadily marginalized. Forest management, designed with the specific aim of conservation, proved unable to cope with the multiple, and often conflicting interests of commercial loggers, private developers, government and military agencies, hunters, and impoverished communities, which placed it under relentless strain.

The National Conservation Strategy (NCS), 1991, triggered a donor-led forestry reform process. In particular, it promoted participatory, community-based forest management. There followed a number of donor-driven initiatives, notably the 25-year Forestry Sector Master Plan (FSMP), the government’s National Environmental Action Plan (NEAP), approved in 2001, and the National Forestry Policy, 1991, all of which strongly endorsed the involvement of communities in forest management. However, the consensus among critics is that the reform process is no different to the enforcement, anti-community thrust of the laws and regulations it has supplanted. They view the process as being donor-led and unfriendly to communities, who express ignorance of a process which, purportedly, addresses their concerns. Consequently, the reforms lack ownership, both among communities and the forest department.

The global surge of interest in corporate social responsibility (CSR) and public private partnerships (PPPs) as sustainable development agents, suggests a role for the private sector in natural resource management (NRM). This paper grapples with the issue of definitional clarity and assesses the scope of forestry sector PPPs to address sustainable development (SD) concerns. Global examples demonstrate that PPPs offer scope for remediation, linking sustainable forest management with assured livelihoods for forest dependent communities. PPPs in forestry in the Pakistani context as partnerships between two entities mutually benefiting each other in some manner are not a new concept. We compare existing PPPs in the forestry sector against a pre-defined norm to see how they measure up, coming up with several recommendations in the process.

* Dr. Shaheen Rafi Khan is a Visiting Research Fellow at the Sustainable Development Policy Institute, Islamabad, Pakistan. He earned his Ph.D. in economics from the Columbia University, USA.